Laurence was the Belgian National Poet until Els Moorstook over in January of 2018. Now Els Moors has started an open call in connection with World Poetry Day:

Adopt your city with a poem

On the 21st of March, World Poetry Day, the National Poet of Belgium, Els Moors, invites all people worldwide to gather their most beautiful odes and elegies on their cities (/ countries / states / …) and make them public. In times of gentrification, mass tourism and worldwide migration we are craving for lonely flâneurs and notorious wanderers who want to lay bare the mysterious heart of their cities. Are you still in love with the city you were born in? Were you pushed on by love, or obliged to leave your hearth and home? Adopt your city by writing an urban elegy and take part in the writing of the most exotic Lonely Planet at this time: The adopted cities.

Would you like to contribute to this special worldwide anthology, and motivate others to join?Then join this action in a few steps: 1. Publish your own poem on our page starting the 21st of March 2018: www.adoptedcities.be2. Post your poem on all your possible (social) media and encourage fellow citizens to adopt a city with a poem and to join the action. Everybody can share their city-poem on our website. On Facebook, please use #adoptedcities so we can follow and share your posts. 3. Enjoy an easily accessible and interactive online anthology, a playful way to motivate people to read and write poetry!

Els Moors

Read the poems of Els Moors, “Dichter des Vaderlands” of Belgiumhere. Read the city poem of her predecessor and ambassador Laurence Vielle here. We would – very much – like people from all over the world to take just a minute to think about poetry (and all its modern interpretations) and to write even a short piece of poetry. Let’s make a tribute to poetry and to our world together!

We had been eagerly awaiting the “relaunch day” for months. As of 1 September, the new lyrikline is up and running!

Many people helped to bring the new site into life and many people came to celebrate with us and followed the relaunch event at c-base in Berlin or online via live stream. For all who couldn’t be there or want to relive the event here’s a little summary.

Ready? Go!

What ingredients does an event need that celebrates the new lyrikline? Next to having a look into what is new, there should be the elements that make lyrikline the living project that it is – poets, users, national partners, voices, languages, poems and translations. We tried to add a bit of it all and stir well…

The event was opened by our two charming presenters, Joel Scott of Australian partner organisation The Red Room Company and Per Bergström who is the Swedish partner with Rámus förlag. Many other local lyrikline partnerssent their video greetings or organised relaunch happenings in their countries

Heiko Strunk, who managed the project right from its start in 1999 and masterminded the website relaunch, gave us a showcase tour of the site and introduced all the new features.

So, what’s new?

To mention all the new things in detail would extend poetry length by bar. Best go and have a look! But here are some of the essentials…

Navigation languages:

Next to the five existing languages to navigate the site which were Arabic, English, French, German, and Slovenian there are four new languages: Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Start page:

The new site opens new ways to access the content of lyrikline so the users don’t get lost amidst the 900 poets, 8,000 poems, 11,000 translations or 60 languages of poetry. Next to thematic teasers, the start page offers a radio like theme stream, recommends poems or poets to discover and informs about new content. From the main menu you can now select poets not only from A-Z or by languages but also by countries and you can browse the site by poems also, e.g. many poems can be found by categories like humorous poetry or issues like alcohol & drugs and many more everyday life topics.

Search & Community:

Have a look at the new design of the poem page, lean back on your couch after you selected „listen to all poems“ by your favourite poet or find the needle in the hay by using the new search and its dozen refinement options. Moreover, you can remember content, create your own lists or explore what other users like by becoming a member of the community.

Whatever access point you start from to explore poetry on lyrikline you’ll be able to find all the six poets who performed at the relaunch event on stage in Berlin, be it Finnish poet Helena Sinervo or Norwegian Simen Hagerup, who were both published on the site during the live event, Els Moors from Belgium, Pedro Sena-Lino from Portugal or the German poets Steffen Popp and Jan Wagner. Since the latter is the most translated poet on lyrikline his poem champignons was read on stage in the languages of all the present poets.

Can you hear me?

google hangouts session: Andrej Hocevar waiting in Ljubljana

To give the lyrikline users the chance to follow the event via online streaming was a main aim since lyrikline is a web project and its main audience is sitting at a computer and not in front of a stage. Another idea was to establish live video connections to our partners and to poets in Nigeria, Russia and Slovenia during the event. In the end this did not go as well as we hoped and not nearly as well as it did when we ‘practised’ two weeks before, meeting in our first google hangouts session to check if we can all hear and see each other. At least we could hear Russian poet Linor Goralik read a poem in Moscow that night, but due to technical problems, the session sadly hardly worked and there was a lot of desperate asking „Can you hear me?“ This photo of a waiting Andrej Hocevar in Slovenia portraits the unlucky attempt. The more we’d like to thank the patient poets Linor Goralik in Russia and Benson Eluma in Nigeria and the partners Andrej Hocevar, Dmitry Kuzmin and Remi Raji who put a lot of time and effort in this. It’s a shame it did not really properly.

Messages from Space

Other connections to the outer world were more successful. It was fun to read what Julià Florit and Thomas Andersson, the partners from Catalonia and Sweden wrote while they took over our lyrikline facebook and twitter accounts to post some impressions of the event. The two of them and poet Els Moors also formed the jury that selected their favourite „space poems“ which were sent for the relaunch by users answering an open call. The space topic was inspired by the event venue, the c-base „space station“ in Berlin which is an association of IT activists and their headquarter was a great place for the lyrikline relaunch event.

We’re happy that with the relaunch, this new era of lyrikline has finally started. It’ll certainly take a good while before all the little bugs left on the new site will be found and fixed. Continuously, more and more poems will be sorted into the categories, more new poets will be published and ideas for new start page teasers will have to be found. It is, as it was, work in progress so stay tuned and visit the new site every now and then.

Thank you all for coming to the relaunch event, for watching it online or for following the whereabouts of lyrikline!

be there on Sunday, 1 Sept at 7pm (CEST) when the new lyrikline will be going online! We cordially invite you to celebrate with us and watch the event live stream on www.lyrikline.org. Heiko Strunk, the lyrikline project manager, will give us a tour of the relaunched website and all its new features and functions, we will link to partners in Nigeria, Russia and Slovenia via video, publish many new poets on the site and we will have six great lyrikline poets on stage, two of them to be published on the relaunch day:

You are invited not only to watch the event but to comment on facebook, on twitter (seems #llrelaunch is a suitable hashtag) and hopefully (still working on making this possible) also chat with us and some of the poets of the event.
The event physically takes place at ‘c-base – ›Raumstation unter Berlin Mitte‹ (Space station beneath Berlin-Mitte)’, a friendly place for IT and open source people, who kindly took us in. The languages of the event will be English and German mainly, but we’ll hear a bit of Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, Norwegian and Finnish too.

See you on Sunday!

We’re excited…

The relaunch of the website has been made possible by a grant from the German Lottery Foundation, Berlin.
The event is taking place with the kind support of: c-base, Institut Ramon Llull, Royal Norwegian Embassy Berlin, Rámus Förlag, Malmö and the Swedish Embassy

Geert Buelens was born in Flanders, Belgium in 1971. He has an extraordinary ear for rhythm and sound and enjoys to play with language. His poetry links the quest for the appropriate linguistic structure with the everyday struggle of the lyrical protagonist.

Congratulations!
It is a great cultural event indeed. I wish all of you luck.
With best regards to all people who are involved in this great happening.
Love & Peace,Nahid Kabiri, Tehran, Iran

I am a avid reader of the site and being a visitor to the site is always a good experience. I have discovered new poets (from South-America, Asia, Africa) on lyrikline.org and this journey of discoveries will continue, I’m sure. Lyrikline.org makes it possible to access rare international contemporary poetry and is a very good platform for international exchange. Lyrikline.org is the best poetry site we have now, an extraordinary opportunity for poetry. Thanks and have a good 10 Year Anniversary!Paolo Ruffilli, Treviso, Italy

Discovering, that a poem can be read, then transmitted through lyrikline all over the world, through all the languages. I was wondering what kind of voice I have while we were recording (I do not like weder my voice on the radio, noch my face on the Fernsehen, maybe like most humans!), but I am sure that everyone of us is happy to know that his/her poems are spread out over the planet, thanks to the serious work achieved by the team of this Werkstatt.Sabah Zouein, Libanon

CONGRATULATIONS!
I have such fond memories. Recording my ‘fox poems’ at yours…
Meeting you was the beginning of my first ‘international’ steps…
Wishing you all the best.
KEEP THE GOOD WORK GOIN’Peter Holvoet-Hanssen, Belgium